Mr Joe Biden has made no secret of the speed with which he plans to bury "America First" as a guiding principle of the nation's foreign policy.
The President-elect said he'll re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, assuming the Iranians are willing to reverse course and observe its limits. He would also sign up for another five years of the only surviving nuclear arms treaty with Russia and double down on US commitments to Nato after four years of threats from President Donald Trump to withdraw from the defence alliance, which guided the West through the Cold War.
At the same time, Mr Biden said he would make Russia "pay a price" for what he said have been disruptions and attempts to influence electionsincluding his own.
The most vivid example, officials said, will come in rethinking the China strategy.
But mostly, Mr Biden said in a statement to The New York Times, he wants to bring an end to a slogan that came to define a US that built walls and made working with allies an afterthoughtand, in Mr Biden's view, undermined any chance of forging a common international approach to fighting a pandemic that has cost more than 1.2 million lives.
But it's far easier to promise to return to the largely internationalist approach of the post-World War II era than it's to execute that shift after four years of global withdrawal and during a pandemic that has reinforced nationalist instincts.
In interviews in the past several weeks, Mr Biden's top advisers began to outline a restoration that might be called the Great Undoing, an effort to reverse course on Mr Trump's aggressive attempt to withdraw to US borders.
"Whether we like it or not, the world simply doesn't organise itself," said Mr Antony Blinken, Mr Biden's long-time national security adviser. "Until the Trump administration, in Democratic and Republican administrations, the US did tons of that organising, and we made some mistakes along the way, for sure."
He added that now, however, the US has discovered what happens "when some other country tries to take our place or, maybe even worse, no one does, and you end up with a vacuum that is filled by bad events".
NYTIMES